Faisal Basri: A study in humility

Faisal Basri: A study in humility

Berni K. Moestafa, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

On Faisal Basri, modesty stands out like his trademark khaki
trousers, his light-colored shirt and his leather sandals among
other men in suits.

"Help yourself please," he said, pointing to a selection of
tea and coffee, in the corner of his office while he prepared
himself a bowl of instant noodles, "I don't like how people here
pamper someone just because he's the dean."

Faisal actually deserves some pampering. It's well over half
past three in the afternoon and the dean of the Perbanas Business
School had not had his lunch yet.

Earlier in the day, he joined a brainstorming session for new
reporters at television station TV 7, gave a lecture on the
Indonesian economy at Perbanas, then agreed to a quick interview
which, he was not to know, turned out to last for over an hour.

Faisal is an economist. Outstanding economists exist, few
however launch political attacks, and of those very few find
power unattractive.

Last year, for instance, he called for an act of civil
disobedience by ignoring regulations of politicians whom he
blamed for neglecting the public, with their power games.

In 1997 before a crowd of rallying students, Faisal demanded
Soeharto's resignation when even political activists refrained to
singling out the former strongman as hampering economic recovery.

Believing the struggle must go on after the Soeharto era, he
helped found the National Mandate Party (PAN) and became its
first secretary-general -- a position so unlike him, as are the
shoes he said he kept in his car for formal occasions.

"I never wanted to become a politician, that has never been my
dream," he said. But when close friends asked him to join PAN, he
did so. That was in 1998.

In January 2001, Faisal resigned over discontent with moves to
change PAN's open political platform into an Islamic one, not, he
asserted, after someone challenged him at a public seminar to
quit PAN.

"What I really like is teaching and doing research," he said.

Faisal hails from the same school as brilliant economists like
Sri Mulyani Indrawati, M. Ihksan and Chatib Basri.

A graduate of the University of Indonesia, he has never really
left his alma mater since he first enrolled there in 1978. He
still teaches economics at the university.

"After graduating I just stayed on as a lecturer and a
researcher. I didn't even think about working somewhere else,"
Faisal said, adding he did once apply for a staff position with
the United Nations but was turned down when he missed an
interview.

He then held a research post at the University of Indonesia's
Institute for Economic and Social Research (LPEM) for 17 years.

From inside LPEM, he launched his criticism of the
government's economic policies that often hit the political
establishment behind them as well.

He had no qualms about blasting the businesses of the Soeharto
clan and his cronies, knowing well their empire was build on
power rather than entrepreneurship.

Soeharto's downfall in 1998 opened the way to uproot excessive
state control over the market under the auspices of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Today Faisal airs his grief over unfair business competition,
over the media and the country's first antimonopoly watchdog, one
of several IMF-backed products.

The Business Competition Supervisory Commission (KPPU) has
become the referee in today's ever tighter market, penalizing
shady dealings of big corporations.

"The market is no saint, without regulations the big ones bury
the small ones, the smart cheat the dumb, two big ones almost
certainly means collusion," said Faisal, now also a KPPU member.

But between the Soeharto-style market control and the risk of
free trade, Faisal goes for the middle ground. "It's like a
pendulum, swinging from one extreme to another, it isn't good."

His down-to-earth insights are not merely pragmatism nurtured
by years of toiling with economic figures at LPEM.

"What are the values I try to adhere to?" Faisal asked as he
pondered a question on the meaning of life. "Quite simple, they
are (the values from) the people nearest to me," he said, citing
his parents first.

His family, he said, was rather poor but not without dignity,
which strikes one as especially hard, since his relatives
belonged to the upper crust of society during the late sixties.

After all, his grandmother's elder brother was Adam Malik, the
venerable foreign minister and vice president during that time.

But while Adam might have set the mark of his family's social
status, he also taught them to be humble.

Faisal recalled how the former vice president gave attention
to family members who were not as well-off as their well-to-do
relatives.

"I look at Adam Malik's modesty, how he taught our family the
true meanings of family values, being non-discriminative," he
said.

Adam's teachings, in the most obvious form, have resurfaced in
Faisal's unpretentious dressing style. It is from within him
though that these values serve the country best.